Real-time communications services for business are available in two deployment models. One model, called on-premise, is a model wherein the Information Technology (IT) department of a company obtains software for providing communications services to their users. Premise-based deployment models have drawbacks. They require costly up-front licenses and IT projects to install and deploy. They have very slow upgrade cycles, with businesses often being many years behind the current release. They also typically struggle in providing business-to-business (b2b) communications.
In an alternative deployment model, referred to as cloud or software as a service (SaaS), a third party—the SaaS provider—builds and operates the server software. The SaaS model introduces difficulties, too. The communications software might run in a data center far away from the business customer, introducing latency. Another issue is that of data sovereignty. Communications services typically include storage and maintenance of personally identifiable information, including user accounts. Many businesses would prefer that personally identifiable user information and company corporate information reside in the corporate data center, not in the data centers of a third party that cannot (perhaps) be trusted as much.